Mechanisms of meaning

Abstract

Word meaning is at best a very vague phenomenon – some lexicographers, including the present writer, have gone so far as to claim that word meanings do not exist. So how is it possible that people can achieve precision in the meaning of their utterances? And how is it possible to use language creatively, to talk about new concepts or to talk about old concepts in new ways? The answer is surprising; it calls into question most previous work in computational linguistics on the so-called ‘word sense disambiguation problem’, which, I shall argue, is still unresolved because it is based on unsound theoretical assumptions. If word senses do not exist, they surely cannot be disambiguated (or processed in any other way). The hypothesis to be explored in this paper is that meanings are associated with the phraseological patterns associated with each word in normal usage, rather than with words themselves.